Chatbots that cognitively helps human: the digital helper as a new way to support the decision making

Worldwide, the recent national development strategies as Industry 4.0 have the aim to support industrial companies in the adoption of the I4.0 technologies such as big data, analytics, cloud, AR/VR, AI, etc. Such intent is justified by the fact that the digital transformation of manufacturing companies is considered a key step to seize game-changing opportunities and gain competitiveness in the market. The servitization of manufacturing companies (i.e. increasingly offering services that are directly coupled to their products) represents one of such opportunities since the service processes (customer support, call handling, help desk, remote monitoring and optimization, etc.) are first digital processes and not physical, as far as the value creation comes from the transformation of input in output of informative type and so it implies the integration of data of different formats, uniform the types, normalize their quality, etc.. The adoption of solutions capable of supporting service operators in such processes and therefore not only favoring the evolution and scalability of service portfolio as the numbers increase (e.g. the interconnected installed base increases) but also to support the reorganization and optimization of the processes involved, can be fundamental. The paper tells how, with the help of a real case (Ricoh Italy), the adoption of digital helpers – which bring together cognitive computing (enables a machine to infer, reason, and learn in a way that emulates the way humans do those things.) with automatic interfaces (i.e. chatbot) – can be a solution to improve the interactions between a given decision-maker (i.e. service operator) and the application portfolio supporting the process (ERP/CRM suite, field service managementsoftware, knowledge base for hotline and technical support, ...)